FRANK CHING
EVER since the Roman Catholic Church and China began a dialogue in the 1980s, it was known that, one day, the Vatican would have to decide what to do about the nation’s Catholic population, divided between those who had suffered persecution for remaining loyal to the pope and those who had joined the schismatic church created by the Communist Party of China, which did not recognize the authority of the pope but was subject to the sway of the party through the state-created Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.